Transparency

Just as we noted here, the analyst estimates for the potential impact of Libor (litigation and regulatory) liabilities have begun. Morgan Stanley sees up to a 17% hit to 2012 EPS (from $420 to $847 million per bank) in a worst case from just regulatory costs, and a further 6.8% potential hit to 2013 EPS if the top-down $400 million average per banks losses from litigation are taken on one year (considerably more if the bottom-up numbers of more than $1 billion are included). They see LIBOR risk in three parts: regulatory fines (we est median 7-12% hit to ‘12 EPS; litigation risk (7% EPS hit over 2 yrs); and less certainty on forward earnings. There are a plethora of assumptions - as one would expect - but the ranges of potential regulatory fine and litigation risk are very large though the MS analysts make the greater point that the LIBOR 'fixing' broadens investor support for more transparency in fixed income trading in addition to fixed income clearing leaving the threat of thinner margins as another investor concern.

Whether Technology Imprisons Us Or Frees Us Remains To Be Seen … The Result Is Largely Up To Us: Scientists, Engineers And We The People As A Whole

A lack of transparency, a lack of enforcement of law and a compliant media which failed to ask the hard questions and do basic investigative journalism led to the price fixing continuing and the manipulation continuing unchecked on such a wide scale for so long - until it was exposed recently. Similarly, the gold market has the appearance of a market that is a victim of “financial repression”. Given the degree of risk in the world – it is arguable that gold prices should have surged in recent months and should be at much higher levels today. The gold market has all the hallmarks of Libor manipulation but as usual all evidence is ignored until official sources acknowlege the truth. However, like LIBOR the gold manipulation 'conspiracy theory' is likely to soon become conspiracy fact.  It will then – belatedly - become accepted wisdom among 'experts.'  Experts who had never acknowledged it, failed to research and comment on it or had simply dismissed it as a “goldbug accusation.”  Financial repression means that most markets are manipulated today - especially bond and foreign exchange markets.

The devil is in the details and we finally have the Spanish Bank rescue details. The cost is not mentioned. We do not know the cost of the borrowing or how long it will last for. That ultimately will be key. Short dated, high coupon loans will not help much. Long dated, low coupon loans will help. The seniority issue doesn’t seem too bad but reading the documentation it looks like it must have been extremely contentious as it can’t help but say it is going to Spain time and again where it was unnecessary. The other reason the seniority doesn’t look too bad is because it doesn’t look like much money will get doled out. The timing seems far too long. This is a political fix and one where they live in some bankers world rather than a traders world. We are VERY concerned about the long timeframe for implementation. The immediate availability of €30 billion is good, but as TF Market Advisors' Peter Tchir confirms, we have our doubts that it will be distributed. However, as we noted earlier, even if fully implemented there would be well under EUR200 billion by year-end anyway and now with the German Court stalling implementation further, the devil in the details may just be overwhelmed by the god of reality.

Remember the running joke about Spain's constantly deteriorating budget? Or was that Greece's? No matter: there was a time when Spain was expected to hit a 5.3% budget deficit in 2012, and the Maastricht mandated 3.0% by 2013. So much for that. It turns out the Spanish economy has deteriorated so much in the last few months, that the EU had no choice but to grant Spain a 1 year extension, according to Europapress. In doing so, the EU has eased deficit targets for Spain by 1% in 2013, granting it a 6.3% deficit miss, a number which will be revised at least once more before the year is over, and the 2013 target is now widened by 1.5% to 4.5%. So much for serious deficit cutting. But let's blame "austerity" while we are at it. It would, however, be great if countries in Europe, or anywhere, were actually austere, and cut their deficits, instead of just blaming austerity for every economic problem while never actually enacting such policies (as we explained before). So while Spain gets an extension due to a "recession of rare violence", the trade off will be even greater supervision by the Eurogroup, or said otherwise, more people will watch how Spain does nothing to actually fix itself and then 6 months from now everyone will be shocked, shocked, when the 2013 deficit is over 8%. In other news, Spain 10 Year bond were trading at 7.08%, well wide for the day and about 20 bps shy of the all time record lows.

In the first of its kind action, Twitter has unveiled its first Twitter Transparency Report, in which it says that as "inspired by the great work done by our peers @Google, the primary goal of this report is to shed more light on: government requests received for user information, government requests received to withhold content, and DMCA takedown notices received from copyright holders." Is it something Americans should be concerned about? Well, with 679 out of a total of 849 user information requests by various governments, or the most by a margin of nearly 700% belonging to the US, we would say so. This also translates into 948 of all users/accounts specified. But most troubling is that Twitter has folded on a 75% of all such demands when it comes to the US government demanding information. It has provided information to only 6 other governments: Australia, Canada, Greece, Japan, Netherlands and the UK, but at a far lower "hit rate." You gotta give it to Uncle Sam: he sure can be persuasive.

While conflicts within and with the Middle East region are still among the top global risks, the paradigm has definitively shifted to China and Europe.

Last week the BEA published it preliminary take on the international investment position (IIP) of the country. As Citi's FX team note, the IIP measures foreign investment assets minus native assets owned by foreigners. In the US, the IIP has been negative (meaning the US is a debtor nation) since 1985. The US’s IIP deficit reached USD 4.03trn in 2012, up sharply from 2.47trn in 2011. As a share of nominal GDP, the IIP deficit reached a record (for the US) of -27%.  Commonly accepted wisdom based on a combination of models and experience is that an IIP bigger than +30% of GDP or smaller than -30% is a problem. On the IIP surplus side, having too big of a net creditor position leads to a perennially strengthening currency that chokes out industry and stokes deflation (think JPY). On the IIP deficit side, having too big of a net debtor position leads to a debt spiral. High debt leads to reluctant external creditors charging ever high interest rates, which leads to economic stagnation and ultimately crisis. The US may not be able to run another dozen years of 3-6% current account deficits without starting to look like a ponzi scheme - but while risk aversion flows (and rates) suggest there is little to worry about, we have noted again and again the moves behind the scenes in global trade flows to shift away from the world's current numeraire.

Three weeks ago we mocked, rightfully so, the utter joke that is Liebor, which had been unchanged for just over 3 months. Nobody cared, certainly not the British Banker Association. This was not the first time: our first allegations of Liebor fraud and manipulation started over three years ago. There were others too. Nobody certainly cared back then. Now, in the aftermath of the Barclays lawsuit, and "those" e-mails, everyone suddenly cares. And a few days after the first public exposure of Lie-borgate, the first victim has been claimed: as numerous sources report, Barclays' Chairman Marcus Agius wil step down immediately. From the WSJ: "Political and investor pressure has mounted on the management of U.K.-based Barclays since the settlement was announced Wednesday. The announcement of Mr. Agius's departure could come as soon as Monday, said one of the people. Mr. Agius, 65 years old, a British-Maltese banker who formerly worked at Lazard Ltd., has led the bank since 2007, steering Barclays through the 2008 financial crisis and avoiding the direct state bailouts that were needed by many of its global peers." While the sacrifice of a scapegoat is expected, what we don't get is why the Chairman: after all by the time Agius became Chair of the British bank, the bulk of the Libor fixing alleged in the FSA lawsuit had already happened. And of course, with Bob Diamond having succeeded John Varley as CEO in 2010, one can easily claim that in this first (of many) confirmed Liebor transgression there really is nobody at fault who can be held accountable. Of course, Barclays is merely the first of many. We fully expect Lieborgate to spread not only to other British BBA member banks, but soon to jump across the Atlantic, where CEOs who have been with their banks for the duration of the entire Libor-fixing term will soon find themselves under the same microscope.

Journalism is about asking questions that corporations, governments and establishments don’t want to answer. It’s about reporting the full-story, no matter how many toes you step on. It’s about opening up power to real scrutiny. And that is something that the propagandists in big media are often incapable of — which of course is why big media is slowly dying. We need to know the depth and width of Fast and Furious and the programs which preceded it: how was it authorised, how was it designed, how did it go wrong, who was to blame for it going wrong. We need to know whether or not the widely-spread allegation that the Obama administration has sold guns directly to Los Zetas is true. We need to know whether or not El Chapo and the Sinaloa Cartel are working with the DEA and the Mexican government. (Both of these allegations are widely accepted as fact in Mexico). We need to know why Obama has chosen to continue the failed drug war, even in spite of overwhelming evidence that the illegality of drugs is the very thing that empowers the criminal cartels, and in spite of the fact that Obama is a former drug user.

The primary "news" narrative may be the failure of the euro, but the master narrative is much, much bigger: centralization has failed. The failure of Europe's "ultimate centralization project" is but a symptom of a global failure of centralization. Though many look at China's command-economy as proof that the model of Elite-controlled centralization is a roaring success, let's check in on China's stability and distribution of prosperity in 2021 before declaring centralization an enduring success. The pressure cooker is already hissing and the flame is being turned up every day. What's the key driver of this master narrative? Technology, specifically, the Internet. Gatekeepers and centralized authority are no match for decentralized knowledge and decision-making. Once a people don't need to rely on a centralized authority to tell them what to do, the centralized authority becomes a costly impediment, a tax on the entire society and economy. In a cost-benefit analysis, centralization once paid significant dividends. Now it is a drag that only inhibits growth and progress. The Eurozone is the ultimate attempt to impose an intrinsically inefficient and unproductive centralized authority on disparate economies, and we are witnessing its spectacular implosion. Centralization acts as a positive feedback, i.e. a self-reinforcing loop that leads to a runaway death spiral.

There are only a few funds in the credit markets who are big enough to help manage a position the size of JPM's CIO office and, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, BlueMountain (one of the biggest) has helped JPM unwind their position by entering the market to take positions that it then sold on to the bank. This agency role is helping the bank to cover its tracks (and reducing the effectiveness and transparency of any and all DTCC data in the course of it), which argues perhaps once again for the exchange trading of these instruments (but that is another topic). While we would be sure that Blue Mountain took a wider than market bid-offer out of the middle of the brokerage move, it is nevertheless clearly a backdoor bailout of the bank's position by what is likely one of its major counterparties anyway (and why not). The activity pick-up this week makes perfect sense (as we noted yesterday) given the single-name CDS roll (and index options expiration) and as Bloomberg's Childs and Harrington note "If you were to need to move a large position, there should be greater liquidity around those days than other days, all else being equal," but as we have noted it remains unclear as to whether the original tail-risk position has been taken down at all (if so then doesn't that make JPM more risky implicitly?) or just the hedge of the hedge that got so out of hand thanks to Iksil's excess.

And since it's Mr. Moneybags, one "bonus" question for the readers regarding Maiden Lane fraud and the subsequent cover up when the GAO came a knockin'

LCH under investigation by Holder under antitrust statutes. And just who was the ultimate counterparty to the Corzine trade?

Very few know about the Federal Reserve's "other" phone number. You know, the one reserved for those in the innermost ring of power. Someone gifted me the number, and I found it offered up the most curious menu of choices: